Vincent van Gogh: The Asylum Year

On May 8th 1889 Vincent Van Gogh was admitted to a mental asylum near St.-Rémy-de-Provence where he remained as a voluntary patient until May the following year. Throughout the year, Van Gogh enjoyed a continuous dialogue with his brother about his art, his mental condition, his hopes and ambitions, and from time to time his despair and sense of failure. The asylum year saw Vincent at his most raw and needy, but also at his most creative - turning out the equivalent of a masterpiece a day. This book offers an account, month by month, of that crucial penultimate chapter in Van Gogh’s life. It is separated from the other chapters in the artist’s life because although treated in all the numerous biographies it is none the less a self contained episode, a play within a play, with a shape and dynamic of its own. Van Gogh’s ‘asylum year’ is unlike any other year in the long history of art.